


Your Legerdemain (Is a True Whodunnit)

by bluesyturtle



Category: Dexter (TV)
Genre: Blood Magic, Brothers, Eldritch, Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Monsters, Past Lives, Platonic Soulmates, Reincarnation, Resurrection, Season/Series 01, Shapeshifting, Telepathy, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:41:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27305017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: Dexter kills Biney and realizes something too late. But is he really too late? Or is there still time to correct his error?No, and yes, respectively.
Relationships: Dexter Morgan & Brian Moser, Dexter Morgan/Brian Moser
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27





	Your Legerdemain (Is a True Whodunnit)

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!

Dexter feels something change in him when he kills Biney. He doesn’t feel, as a general rule, but his brother’s been breaking that rule ever since he came back into Dexter’s life. It shouldn’t surprise him that it’s happening now. Big Brother beckons, beguiles, beseeches. It’s the way, with Biney.

All his life there’s been an entity. Never a voice, so much. Not like Harry thought. It was more an echo thrown off the words he could never say. A gaping emptiness to rival the carved out ache hunger leaves in the belly. The echo inside of him, never searching for any voice but his own, speaks in a language of afterimages and the cold whir of planets in the interminable, soundless cosmos. The voice, the entity, it’s him. The void where, he knows now, someone else used to fit, it’s—

_I forgive you._

—Biney looking across the room at him, upside down, eyes already beginning to dim the more that his lungs contract around nothing. The breath has gone out of him so fast, but the words, still, come clear as moonlight cutting and diluting the perfect black of night.

_I’ll find you again. I’ll wait for you. I’ll wait._

And knocked down in the corner of the room with his knees pressed tightly to his chest and his hands over his ears to keep those promises out, Dexter feels himself, within that voice of eternity, speak through the Dark Passenger. He hears himself, whispering, screaming, _You let me kill you again._

Biney’s dead before any part of him can respond, and Dexter stays crumpled up in the corner, not breathing either, for a long time, not moving, not seeing the room or his brother’s corpse or the blade in his hand.

The ring of Biney’s blood doesn’t touch him, but something in the glint of it makes Dexter wish it would. It sets his teeth on edge, the way it always does. It calls him, the way it always does.

Eventually he has to leave. It’s an active crime scene, after all, or it will be as soon as Miami’s Finest find it, and he can’t be seen here. Can’t be seen caring or devastated, when no other person alive makes him feel those things, _or anything,_ the way the Ice Truck Killer did.

He supposes he can’t be seen holding the murder weapon either. If he’s to be pragmatic about it.

Forensics hits the scene with gusto. They can’t wait to make the collar. Can’t wait to tear apart the fabric of Rudy Cooper’s meticulously stitched life, with about as much success as they had deconstructing the scene at the hotel. Bereft of context, they can’t grasp how the mild-mannered, charming professional, so well-adjusted, could’ve been the monster under the bed all along.

Dexter doesn’t have the luxury of not knowing. But, he supposes, alongside his other suppositions, he never really did have that luxury in the first place. Maybe it’s only fair that no one can feel what he’s feeling now. Maybe it’s what he deserves.

But he keeps thinking about that rumble of a voice unlike anything he’s ever known before. He keeps thinking— that he does know it. That he did know it, once.

 _I’ll wait for you,_ Biney told him. _I’ll wait._

And Dexter watching the pool of his blood yawning out towards him like a a great beast’s breath fogging up into the first cold snap before hibernation. And how badly Dexter had wanted it to touch him. His fixation, always, with blood. Keeping it. Reducing whole lives and identities and darknesses, down to droplets kissed closed between slides of clear plastic. Biney’s same fascination with blood, draining it and saving it and transforming it. Turning it into a memory.

After the autopsy, and after the apartment has been processed, Dexter finds himself in the morgue alone, scalpel in hand. He stares down at his brother’s pale face, at his serene expression.

_I forgive you. I’ll find you again._

Dexter presses his thumb to the sharpened edge of the scalpel and bears down on it until his back teeth ache and his hand is dripping over the tile.

The scalpel hits the floor with a metallic clatter. His blood fills the cup of his palm. He flicks a glance up to his brother’s face, half-expecting to see his eyes open, mouth wry, a joke poised already on his lips. Blood drips sluggishly off the edge of his hand. He swallows down logic, that jaded cynicism that comes with living in the real world and believing that overtures like this are pointless and misguided, and he smears his bleeding hand over the Y-incision in his brother’s chest.

He waits.

In the cold, white light of the morgue well past three in the morning, he stands with his hand spread over the hollow of Biney’s chest where his heart hasn’t beaten in days. He waits, and his own heart races in sharp contrast to the dead flesh beneath his hand. There’s no sound, no warmth, no vibration, nothing.

Dexter’s throat aches. He feels as small as he was the day his mother came apart in front of him. He doesn’t understand. He’d been so sure.

There’s a noise beneath him.

Dexter opens his eyes, confused at the way his eyelashes stick together, and looks up from the bloody mess he’s smeared into Biney’s stitches, up to the cracked slits of his brother’s eyes. They’re glossed over the crepuscular color of the craters in the moon. His heart thumps once against Dexter’s palm. A faint, stuttering arrhythmia, just a sigh of a heartbeat.

Biney’s voice comes out like chalk. He says, “Ba…by… brother…”

“What the fuck,” Dexter whispers, tearing his hand away and stumbling back. He really believed this exact thing would happen, but he can’t actually wrap his head around the physics. His back hits the wall, like it had in the freezer watching his brother bleed out. “What the fuck are you?”

For what feels like a long time, Biney doesn’t move or breathe. Dexter doesn’t think he does either, and then, before he’s really figured out how to feel about this new development, Biney speaks inside Dexter’s head like he did when he was dying. It must take a lot out of him because he only gets one word out this time around.

_We._

Dexter pushes off the wall and moves in for a closer look. Biney’s eyes flutter open, easier now, but still, he doesn’t breathe. Dexter lifts a tentative hand and presses the bloody pad of his thumb to the centermost point of the incision on his chest. There’s nothing remarkable about it, not at first. But then, those droplets of red seem to curdle and absorb into the purpled, decaying skin.

“What do you mean, we?” Dexter asks, mystified. Maybe he should be afraid, but that isn’t what he feels. That isn’t ever what Biney makes him feel.

“We,” Biney croaks, grunting at the sharp pop beneath his ribs when his lungs fill with air.

“Snap, crackle, pop, Biney,” Dexter muses, already adjusting to this strange, incredible reality. And why not? His life was pretty unbelieable to begin with. “Let’s go.”

There’s that coy edge to Biney’s mouth that Dexter was waiting for. He feels the corner of his own ticking up and up in answer. Hard to know which of them is the voice, and the echo, or if there’s a difference.

“You always kill me, you know,” Biney whispers, for the benefit it brings of not having to put so much strain on his voice. What with the gash across his throat, and all. “Not usually this quick,” he adds with a laugh that strangles oddly in his chest where his body can’t expand enough to accommodate the movement. His milky eyes find Dexter, fond, and he muses, “But you’ve… never brought me back… this quickly either. Sure you need me to… explain it _,_ Dex?”

Dexter… doesn’t, and isn’t Biney’s style to tell him anything outright either, when he could leave breadcrumbs instead. 

He looks around for the scalpel he dropped, Biney watching all the while, calm. Inscrutable. Absurdly, inordinately affectionate.

Dexter finds it under the examination table and carves a line through his palm. He watches the blood well up and run, glancing from it to his brother’s impassive face. Like he doesn’t care whether Dexter gives him what he needs or leaves him out to dry. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe being dead grants the dying party untold patience and wisdom.

He seals his opened hand around his brother’s throat, over the matching line carved there, and the pulse beneath flutters, then pounds at a full gallop. Color floods his brother’s eyes. _Alive_.

Biney risks a full breath, sighing when his body finally allows it with no ominous crunching.

 _Ah, decomp,_ Dexter thinks, amused in spite of himself.

“Why do you _let me_ kill you?” he wonders out loud, keeping his hand right where it is, even though he could probably let go, if he wanted.

“Because you’re my brother,” Biney tells him easily, nakedly.

“This time,” Dexter says, unthinkingly. And then, frowning at the words in his mouth, “This time I’m your brother.”

“Yes,” Biney sighs, closing his eyes, and that seems foolish to Dexter, when there’s still a scalpel in his hand, but he understands. “A long time ago, and I mean, _a really long_ time ago…”

Dexter nods, knowing then. “We were one.”

“Two hands, two feet,” Biney murmurs meanderingly, “two eyes, and a heart to share.”

“How many voices?”

Biney smiles and opens his eyes. “We didn’t need one.”

Of course.

The Dark Passenger doesn’t need a voice. It never has. It only lets him feel, for a moment, full and held within the solitude of his skeleton. Cradled, fortified, exhilarated. Inundated with color and vitality just like Biney’s glistening eyes.

“And now?” Dexter asks, easing up on the bloody weight of his hand, thrilling at the rush of air in that windpipe, at the buzzing voice in that throat, at the still-hammering pulse in that neck. “What are we now?”

“Whatever we want to be, baby brother.”

“And if…” Finally he takes his hand away, done with the pretense, though he’s sure Biney would’ve let him have it as long as he wanted it. “If I wanted you to go?”

“I’ve followed you to the ends of the earth,” he says, rolling his head against the metal table until his neck pops, less the sound of muscles fighting atrophy and more the sound of cartilage waking up. “I know where to wait for you. As Rudy Cooper, or Brian Moser, or…”

“Biney,” Dexter tells him, decisive.

Biney’s eyes flick back to him, only his eyes, and for a moment, dappled in Dexter’s blood where he should be slathered in it, his complexion starting to warm up by leaps and bounds, he looks immutable. Timeless. A thing killed often enough not to be unsettled at the pains of being born, though Dexter never would’ve pictured resurrection looking like this.

Imagine? The Easter Bunny’d be out of work, and Hallmark would never sell another card again.

“As anyone,” Biney murmurs, agreeable as ever. He turns his wrist on the table, a loud creak filling the air as he does, and granule by granule, the shape of his hand— changes. At first it sort of looks like a hand with the fingers grown too long and slender, but the more it breaks itself down and manifests anew, the more it resembles metal stripping itself away from raw ore. Biney hums, flexing the appendage that was his hand and now is something else. “As anything.”

 _With power like that,_ Dexter thinks, twitching his sticky hand toward the murderously spiked mallet of Biney’s hand.

But he’d thought that anyway, hadn’t he? Even before he knew this was possible.

Either one of them could’ve gone on forever undetected, perfect in their craft, in their dark hobby— the farce of his ordinary life could’ve continued forever, if they didn’t need each other.

Except they do. They always have.

That’s why Dexter’s Dark Passenger answers to Biney’s. It’s why there’s space in both of them for a single fractured entity the size of a fiery, unlivable galaxy.

“Why blood?” Dexter asks, though he doesn’t have to. He’s just curious if Biney will tell him. “Why blood if it’s not about Mom?”

“You might as well ask why alchemists tried to spin gold out of flax,” Biney tells him, fluttering fingers out of his strange appendage once more and offering them to Dexter to touch, though the texture isn’t quite skin, no matter how much it resembles a human hand.

Dexter slips his fingers through Biney’s, the breath stuttering out of him unevenly when a ripple shocks up the length of his arm and sinks into his shoulder. His own hand, not quite skin but still holding its familiar shape, shifts. Like it can’t decide what to be, now that the illusion of a ‘correct’ form has been lifted.

“We,” Biney says again, looking up at him, and for the warmth in his skin and the light sparking in his eyes, he looks just like he did sitting in the house he bought for them. Convivial, eager to please, infinitely patient.

“You’ve explained this to me before,” Dexter murmurs, flexing his hand, mesmerized at the shimmer in his reptilian flesh.

“You can never remember,” he murmurs back, smiling and tilting his head. At that angle, the overhead light casts perfect matching rings of white in his eyes. “And I think you like to hear me tell it.”

“I do.”

Biney laughs, a gentle huff of air, and the corners of his eyes crinkle around a smile. “My best guess, about the blood? Would be Mom, actually. When it happened, didn’t you want to put the pieces back the way they’d come? To fix her?”

“The same way I wanted to put your pieces back, after,” Dexter drones thoughtfully. He catches Biney’s hand to help him sit up once he starts trying. “I didn’t think…”

“I know,” Biney says around a pained groan. Everything down his back seems to crack at once.

Dexter inspects the Y-incision again, going so far as to press questing fingertips to the sutures. His other hand is still twisted up in Biney’s, neither of them strictly hands any longer, but Dexter doesn’t have a better name for them. Which gets him thinking. “What do we call ourselves?”

“Brothers.” Biney smiles preciously at the sardonic look Dexter gives him. “We’ve used different words. Hard to keep track after all this time. Personally I think John Carpenter had the right idea calling his monster The Shape. Nice and ambiguous. Open to interpretation,” he teases, squeezing Dexter’s not-hand. “Hey, Dex?” At his answering hum, he asks, softly, “ _Do_ you want me to go?”

“No,” Dexter surprises himself by saying. It’s true, and there’s really no use lying about it, but he hadn’t _meant_ to just come right out and say it. Only, it seems so useless to fib about trivialities when their meathook hands register touch in such a wholly unique, incomprehensible way.

“Well, I can’t stay. I don’t think you can either,” he muses with a mischievous glance at the various ruddy stains Dexter’s marked up the room with. “So what’s it gonna be, baby brother?”

Dexter doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything anymore.

Except that’s not true, really.

“I’m getting you out of here,” Dexter tells him, ushering Biney to swing his legs over the side of the examination table. “Maybe I’ve killed you before, but I don’t wanna do it again tonight.”

“Thanks a lot,” Biney quips, smirking, clutching the white sheet around his hips.

Dexter scoffs. “Your hand’s an immersion blender, but you can’t magic up a fig leaf?”

“I’d still be naked.”

“That’s a pretty biblical limit.”

Biney hums thoughtfully, letting go of the sheet. Tension coils and crackles all down his spine, and after a moment, the shape of him begins to change and reduce. He disappears beneath the loose puddle of white fabric, and whatever form he’s taken causes the sheet to shudder and whisper. Dexter steps back, toeing at the edge of the sheet to drag it away. A black cat crawls out of the heaped nest pooled around him. Biney shakes his head and drops his chest low to the ground in a deep stretch. He trots over and makes figure-eights through Dexter’s legs.

Dexter bends to brush his knuckles down the feline slope of his back, wondering if he could do that, too. Probably. He catches Biney under his ribs and hefts him up to look him in his yellow eyes. Even beneath the set of his black fur, Dexter can feel the sutured Y-incision. He switches over to his bloody hand, lines it up so more of his blood will go where it’s needed, if it’s needed. Like clockwork, it knits itself back together beneath his sticky fingers.

“I’ve gotta clean up my mess. If you wanna go, you can go.”

Biney meows at him, pawing at Dexter until he hoists him up a little higher to climb onto his shoulder.

Dexter balances him there on his way to the sink to wash his hands and forearms until the blood’s all gone. If it takes Biney a lot more to heal up than a measly cut across Dexter’s hand, then they’ll just bump up his next killing. He accelerated the timeline for Jaworski to suit the rising tension in himself; he can accelerate it again to suit Biney’s need. It’s his fault he’s in need of a re-up, after all.

Hands clean, he tracks around for something to wrap his hand with, saying, “If you’re gonna stay, you can’t kill Deb.” At the predictable, somewhat endearing growl that gets him, he adds, “I know you’re jealous. You shouldn’t be.”

 _She’s not your family,_ Biney says inside his head.

“She doesn’t make me feel, either,” Dexter tells him. When that only earns him a querulous chirp, he adds, wryly, “Like I said, you shouldn’t be jealous. It’s not a good look on you.”

_Can you blame me?_

“Guess not,” Dexter says, looting the nearest cabinet for bleach and thick rubber gloves.

_Do you?_

Dexter pauses in the middle of pouring bleach into a bucket standing in the deep metal sink. He lets the tap run for a few seconds while he thinks, then shuts it off. He thinks for a moment and says, “No. Now if you’ll excuse me?”

It takes the better part of two hours to scrub everything to his satisfaction. It might not’ve taken so long, but they are in a police morgue, and it behooves him to practice caution. Plus, it’s oddly meditative, purging his existence from this room while the examination table sparkles at the center of the room, its occupant grooming himself by the door. Every once in a while he hears the quiet pop-and-scratch of Biney yanking his stitches out.

 _I’ve spent weirder nights,_ he thinks.

 _Have you?_ Biney thinks back at him, speaking with that voice that isn’t a voice, but an echo of things left unsaid, given breath. _Weirder than meathooks for hands?_

Dexter hums, remembering patches of firelight and choppy waves at night and the glint coming off stolen gold, altars slick with engine oil blood. The same color of their hands trying to decide what shape to take. The thought sets him smiling, a strange, quivering thing on his face. For the span of a single wild heartbeat, he can’t tell whether his face is the one he was born wearing in this life, or if it’s amorphous and lethal. The way he’s always felt.

He speaks in a voice like the quarter-misstep between channels, caught between static and a proper voice: “The Visigoths come to mind.”

It’s so quiet in the morgue, he can hear Biney purring from across the room. Dexter stares at the inkblot he presents against the dark, fingers twitching. The more he starts to remember, the faster his heart begins to race.

“We don’t have time tonight,” he murmurs, stopping to press his hand to his mouth.

_There’ll be time, baby brother._

Dexter nods, take a breath, and pours the murky water out into the sink. He tosses the dead fly chunks of bloody wire, snaps off his gloves, and washes his hands again. The chemical reek of bleach burns in his nose, constant and familiar.

Biney chirrups up at him, tail swishing. Dexter scoops him up again.

He carries him out of the precinct into the parking lot, half wanting to walk the long way home just to bask in the approaching dawn with his brother’s heartbeat fluttering beneath his hand. He settles for dropping him in the passenger’s seat and driving back to his apartment with the windows down.

By the time they’re back behind doors and Biney can get dressed, Dexter’s gotten used to seeing him as a cat.

“Oughta get you a ribbon and a bell, big brother.”

Biney’s head appears through the neck of Dexter’s shirt. He gives him an arch look and pointedly throws back the blanket on Dexter’s bed before climbing in. “Bit out of character for you, I would think.”

Dexter kicks off his shoes and climbs in next to him so they’re curled up facing each other. He lays his hand down between them, palm up. Biney fits his hand into Dexter’s, and like before, their composition shifts and melds. Sweet, dark comfort.

“As if anybody really knows what I’m like,” he murmurs, watching Biney’s face even after his eyes close.

“I know what you’re like.”

Dexter flexes his fingers against Biney’s. “A red ribbon,” he says decisively.

Biney mumbles something under his breath, already asleep. Dexter hooks one finger in the loose collar of his borrowed shirt to look for proof of the Y-incision. The skin’s no broken anymore, but there’s a pink line of scar tissue where the M.E.’s twine had been holding him together before.

He can’t count the lives, or the deaths, or the kills. They’re innumerable.

_Go to sleep, baby brother._

Dexter closes his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Gumshoe" by the immaculate Penny & Sparrow.


End file.
